In such a way is freedom of thought lost... By small cuts. By small acts of disapproval. By a thousand discouragements of spirit.
He was a man of the very broadest outlook, but he never believed in going anywhere. He had a very sensitive stomach, you know, and that is always a disincentive to travel. If you have a sensitive stom...
He evidently did not care that they were in full view of a cluster of dog-owners walking their dogs. He stopped and took her in his arms, kissing her passionately and urgently.
But if you do not forgive, and you think all the time about getting even, or punishing somebody who has done you a wrong, what are you achieving?
And yet,’ he went on, ‘who talks about forgiveness these days, other than the people who come to this place, or to places like this? What politician, what public person, do we hear standing up and say...
And then the second thing you have to do is go and see your son. That is a duty of love, Andrew. It's as simple as that. A duty of love. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?
And the difference was this, she mused: those who are twenty don’t know what it is like to be forty, whereas those who are forty know what it is like to be twenty. It was a bit like discussing a forei...
And she lowered her eyes at the gentle reproach, for she had learned her lesson, even if there would be occasional, but only very occasional, relapses; for none of us is perfect, except, of course, th...
And she began to weep, dropping her head onto her forearms and rocking backwards and forwards in that curious motion that is perhaps a subconscious attempt to mimic the movement that brings comfort to...
And God was here anyway, before the missionaries came. We called him by a different name, then, and he did not live over at the Jews’ place; he lived here in Africa, in the rocks, in the sky, in place...
Although she was unenthusiastic about theology, she had long since realised that the real point of prayer was not to flatter those addressed; prayer was a form of meditation, she decided, and it did n...
All that I know is that he is sad in his heart...that is the place where his sadness is. Right there. And I do not think that is ever very easy to deal with sadness in that part of the body.
Alain de Botton has written a book called How Proust Can Change Your Life, a title that I suspect was devised with at least some tongue in cheek but that speaks, nonetheless, to a very real possibilit...
A wedding was a strange ceremony, she thought, with all those formal words, those solemn vows made by one to another; whereas the real question that should be put to the two people involved was a very...
A flaky skin was particularly bad if you were a criminal, she had read, as it meant that you left a great deal of DNA at the scene of the crime. That had amused her. That would teach any flaky-skinned...
A dog sees no point in dwelling on things that have happened; the important thing is that they are not happening now. In that respect, they have something to teach us: we so often feel that then is no...
Thinking about somebody every day of his life... oh yes, he said to himself. Oh yes, you do. You think about somebody. He fills your world. He is all about you, a presence, and you think about him; yo...
The real poison within families is not the poison that you put in your food, but the poison that grows up in the heart when people are jealous of one another and cannot speak these feelings and drain...
And with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometime...
I heard him say that he knew that he had been very stupid and that he would not be stupid again. Those were his very words, Mma, and I wrote them down on a piece of paper which we can keep in the offi...